Yup, that's my experience too. I do my research in a particular way (research institute, YMMV), and it is IT's job to facilitate the IT aspects of that job. When I then need to SSH to an outside computational cluster, this is blocked by their (mcafee) firewall. Not only that, but (strangely) DNS requests also seem to be blocked if originating from an application other than a web-browser.
When I then call IT, and ask them to open SSH for my IP, they have no idea what I'm talking about. Finally, after days of explaining, I get access to a SOCKS server circumventing the firewall. Except, of course, for DNS so I am still stuck with editing /etc/hosts to add external cluster nodes.
This is not the first institute I have worked in, and in other institutes IT was more than willing to help me get access, sometimes after a cursory check of the "security" of my computer. Given it's a mac, that was no issue.
Now this current IT gets me riled. They make my life difficult. They stop me from doing my work in an easy way and insist on making it difficult when it does not need to be.